The market has been more and more invaded by counterfeit products on several fields of activity, constituting an aggressive and notorious way to prejudice manufacturers, retailers and consumers in general, who often purchase products under famous brands or trademarks or with wide market reputation as original, when in fact they have an unknown origin. Besides all problems, this is also an evident way to prejudice the treasury, since said products are usually manufactured illegally, not paying taxes and other duties.
Such occurrences have become intense due to the increasing need of manufacturers of apparel articles, especially those bearers of famous labels or trademarks, to outsource their products, that is, pass on some manufacturing steps to small manufacturers, which however should keep the quality standards of the corresponding trademark.
This procedure has as purpose to reduce financial costs and increase productivity, but has however generated the possibility of parallel negotiations between such small manufacturers and stores or department stores, potentially considered as product re-sellers, thus imposing natural losses to the bearers the trademarks who have invested considerable amounts to reach their commercial goals.
Several apparel articles are provided with different ways of identification of their origin or manufacturer. Paints, shirts and others have buttons with the trademark printed on them, besides the traditional label.
As the time went by, labels proved to be easily fakeable, the same happening to the called buttons. For these reasons, counterfeit products, ignoring trademark and tax rights, end up arriving at the market with the same quality as the original product.
In the fight to solve such problems, the inventor has created an electronic device installed on said button, whose patent application in Brazil was filed on Jun. 19, 2000 under no. MU 8001255-8. Said application is provided with an electronic device installed on the paints, shirt, jacket, shoe, purse or similar, to be installed during the last step of manufacture of the apparel article, by means of a “small chip forming a circuit with a receiving antenna, when closed, with said circuit storing a fixed code to identify the article and/or also a flexible code for eventual complementary information”.
Still according to the description of the previous application, “such codes will be read by A RFID-type reader (by means of an identification system by radio frequency) by e.g. a brand auditor and the retailer employee himself/herself, whenever required for internal control”.
The description report of the previous application also discloses: “This way, full control of the origin of given batches is obtained by the label owner, allowing to find out if it has been manufactured according to usual processes (by means of reading the fixed code) and there is also a possibility for the internal control at the store itself by its employees (by means of reading the flexible code, which can allow the inclusion of complementary information on the chip)”
MU 8001255-8 further discloses that: “By means of sequential recording of programmed codes, the chip can even be detected by third parties, but a copy is nevertheless nearly impossible to be carried out, since the code sequence can be reached from endless combinations.
The description finally states that: “After reading, to identify the clothe, collected information may be downloaded in a center comprising a PC or any other computer for better control and required steps.”